Still, Marshall is reticent to put the entirety of the Campus Apartments IT enterprise into the cloud, citing concerns over security as well as future systems integration and just-in-time access to critical data. “In general, you’ll find that the larger student housing and apartment firms are not using SaaS or the cloud to run their back-end systems,” Marshall says. “We are running a lot of different software platforms, and if you have your core data on someone else’s servers, you do not have the same level of accessibility and integration as you would have if you were running it yourself.”
Winn disagrees and points to RealPage’s UDE Direct (which allows for daily downloads of all client data) and other application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow users to access the firm’s Cloud Computing Division SaaS data center with their own report writing tools. “We’ve built hundreds of Web services allowing real-time third-party interaction with the system, so the notion that this is closed or inflexible is not accurate,” Winn says. “Cloud computing is a place to outsource all of your enterprise systems, and it is not uncommon for us to host 10 to 15 different vendors in the cloud that collectively a large owner or fee manager would use to run their business. The cloud concept is a megatrend allowing the CIO to figure out ways to improve the business processes that run their company. That’s where the high return on investment for a CIO comes from. I would say managing servers and firewalls and that kind of thing is not high value-add.”
4. The continuing evolution of the “right” solution
Regardless of where systems sit, multifamily technology is certain to continue its evolution toward user-friendly, just-in-time data delivery that will also increasingly see cooperation between IT and marketing departments. “I don’t know that marketing and IT are becoming one industry-wide,” Davidoff says. “But there is a greater shared understanding of the concepts and opportunities between those two disciplines. There are still only a handful of multifamily companies other than Archstone where marketing reports to the CIO, but you can see even at the technology conferences that there is a more rounded representation of IT, e-commerce, and marketing personnel.”
Still, Marshall is reticent to put the entirety of the Campus Apartments IT enterprise into the cloud, citing concerns over security as well as future systems integration and just-in-time access to critical data. “In general, you’ll find that the larger student housing and apartment firms are not using SaaS or the cloud to run their back-end systems,” Marshall says. “We are running a lot of different software platforms, and if you have your core data on someone else’s servers, you do not have the same level of accessibility and integration as you would have if you were running it yourself.”
Winn disagrees and points to RealPage’s UDE Direct (which allows for daily downloads of all client data) and other application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow users to access the firm’s Cloud Computing Division SaaS data center with their own report writing tools. “We’ve built hundreds of Web services allowing real-time third-party interaction with the system, so the notion that this is closed or inflexible is not accurate,” Winn says. “Cloud computing is a place to outsource all of your enterprise systems, and it is not uncommon for us to host 10 to 15 different vendors in the cloud that collectively a large owner or fee manager would use to run their business. The cloud concept is a megatrend allowing the CIO to figure out ways to improve the business processes that run their company. That’s where the high return on investment for a CIO comes from. I would say managing servers and firewalls and that kind of thing is not high value-add.”
4. The continuing evolution of the “right” solution
Regardless of where systems sit, multifamily technology is certain to continue its evolution toward user-friendly, just-in-time data delivery that will also increasingly see cooperation between IT and marketing departments. “I don’t know that marketing and IT are becoming one industry-wide,” Davidoff says. “But there is a greater shared understanding of the concepts and opportunities between those two disciplines. There are still only a handful of multifamily companies other than Archstone where marketing reports to the CIO, but you can see even at the technology conferences that there is a more rounded representation of IT, e-commerce, and marketing personnel.”
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